A reminder that I rewatched The Heiress and was quite impressed with Miriam Hopkins' supporting role.
I rewatched Marketa Lazarova today, and while I had already nominated the title character for best supporting actress of 1967, I now have a clear enough grasp of the movie to remember the other characters:
The Czechs
Kozlik, the quasi-pagan patriarch of the Czech robbers, played by Josef Kemr
Mikolas, one of his many sons, Marketa's abductor, rapist, lover and at the end husband, played by Frantisek Velecky
Adam, another son, having lost his left arm after a snake bite and engaging in incest with his sister Alexandra, played by Ivan Paluch
Alexandra, Kozlik's daughter, later the lover of the captive Kristian, played by Pavla Polaskoya
Katerina, Kozlik's wife, who survive the final attack on her husband's gang, played by Nada Henja
Lazar, Lazarova's father, a merchant and scavenger, who survives being nailed to his gate, played by Michal Kozuch
The Germans/The Christians
Kristian, the son of a German count kidnapped by Mikolas and Adam at the beginning of the movie on his way to being appointed a bishop, becomes Alexandra's lover and impregnates her, played by Vastimil Harpes
The Count, Kristians's father, played by Harry Studt
Captain Pivo, the leader of the military forces against Kozlik, played by Zdenek Kryzanek
Bernard, a wondering monk, played by Vladimir Mensik
The Abbess, of the nunnery that Marketa is betrothed to, played by Karla Chadimova
Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw six movies. Let's start with Indiscreet and Les Girls. Both are made by a first rate director (Stanley Donen and George Cukor). Both are amusing, but they both lack a certain weight. In the first, Cary Grant pretends to be married so the women he meets won't make too many demands on him. Ultimately this shallow contrivance doesn't last. In the second, there is a Rashomon structure as a quarrel erupts over what happened to break up Gene Kelly and his three girl troupe. The main difference in quality is that in the first we get to watch Grant and Ingrid Bergman with their considerable charm, while in the second Kelly doesn't dance a lot and most of the screen time is devoted to the three women who put together don't add up to Kelly. The Guardsman is another competent comedy about a jealous actor who pretends to be the title character to test the faithfulness of his actress wife. It got Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, also husband and wife, oscar nominations. Fontanne strikes me as better than the actual winner that year (Helen Hayes), while Lunt strikes me as better than Frederic March but not as good as Wallace Beery. Perhaps a more imaginative director could have brought out the Pirandellian themes better. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is another mildly amusing comedy, with the plot given away in the title. I suppose one's enjoyment of it depends how much one is willing to indulge creatures who after all kill human beings.
The Ugly American is of more historical interest than a competent film. Based on a novel that a few years earlier offered an apparently bold vision of resisting communism in South East Asia, it came out just a few months before the product of said vision, the Diem Regime of South Vietnam, inconveniently collapsed. On the one hand, the more coherent political critique in the original book about American arrogance in here occurs as unexplained embassy incompetence. (When Brando's ambassador character arrives he is nearly lynched in a riot. Later a big highway announcement is scuttled by a terrorist attack.) The imaginary country is Buddhist (like Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand) and has a monarchy (like Laos and Thailand), but appears to be divided (like Vietnam). Neither the independence of the country, nor why the current government is on the one hand authoritarian and open to compromise, nor why communism appears to be a major threat is explained. As such, the attempts to add nuance (is the angry anti-imperialist character, who most unhelpfully resembles Muslim Indonesia's Sukarno really a communist or not?) seems more an attempt to cover American ideological bases, rather than say something intelligent about the region. Trenque Laquen is a critically lauded 4 and half hour movie (originally shown in two parts) whose appeal escapes me. Supposedly about why a woman investigating some things appears to have vanished, the movie takes a radical approach to both mystery and romance. Indeed if the mysteries in the two parts peter out while the romance has so little appeal, why should I care enough to watch the movie?
The Ugly American is of more historical interest than a competent film. Based on a novel that a few years earlier offered an apparently bold vision of resisting communism in South East Asia, it came out just a few months before the product of said vision, the Diem Regime of South Vietnam, inconveniently collapsed. On the one hand, the more coherent political critique in the original book about American arrogance in here occurs as unexplained embassy incompetence. (When Brando's ambassador character arrives he is nearly lynched in a riot. Later a big highway announcement is scuttled by a terrorist attack.) The imaginary country is Buddhist (like Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand) and has a monarchy (like Laos and Thailand), but appears to be divided (like Vietnam). Neither the independence of the country, nor why the current government is on the one hand authoritarian and open to compromise, nor why communism appears to be a major threat is explained. As such, the attempts to add nuance (is the angry anti-imperialist character, who most unhelpfully resembles Muslim Indonesia's Sukarno really a communist or not?) seems more an attempt to cover American ideological bases, rather than say something intelligent about the region. Trenque Laquen is a critically lauded 4 and half hour movie (originally shown in two parts) whose appeal escapes me. Supposedly about why a woman investigating some things appears to have vanished, the movie takes a radical approach to both mystery and romance. Indeed if the mysteries in the two parts peter out while the romance has so little appeal, why should I care enough to watch the movie?
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. Let's start with the two 1972 MGM musicals. Man of La Mancha is not the BOMB that Leonard Maltin described. But it is a rather bland and uninteresting musical. I don't know how much that is the result of the original musical, which only has one memorable number. O'Toole is good enough as Don Quixote and Loren is OK as the object of his delusion. Certainly the setting and the camera work are underwhelming. But James Coco isn't really allowed to bring anything to Sancho Panza, one of the great characters in all of fiction in his own right. The Great Waltz starts off with some promise, with about ten or fifteen minutes of charming waltzes. Apparently Song of Norway didn't lose so much money that MGM was willing to give Andrew L. Stone another chance. But the songs that serve as explanation for what's going on in between Strauss' music are annoying written, which just becomes more irritating as time goes on. And it's not clear why anyone though we wanted to hear about Strauss' rather sordid, unromantic and otherwise not very compelling love life.
The other two movies are a bit better. The Men is best known for being Brando's film debut. He is good as a paraplegic solider who does not adapt to the situation with the good grace one might expect of our Hollywood military men. Although the movie does have the touches from Stanley Kramer the producer that would make the future Stanley Kramer the director so deadly, Everett Sloane is allowed to both provide useful advice as the key doctor in Brando's hospital, and show some rudeness at his patients. A Haunting in Venice is better than Branagh's two previous Agatha Christie movies which were distinctly worse than the seventies version. Now Poirot is in Venice, unlike Christie's character, and Branagh does have some fun with misc-en-scene. The movie also has the advantage of using a lesser known Christie novel (Hallowe'en Party) and revising it from what appears from the Wikipedia summary to be one of Christie's lesser plots. The disadvantage is that the solution is still not among Christie's best, so we don't really get the pleasure of Poirot showing his genius. Trying to get all-star casts for Branagh's previous two movies was another irritating problem with those movies, so here the recognizable stars are limited to an occasionally amusing Tina Fey ("That's not an expression in any language") and Michelle Yeoh as an over-confident medium.
The other two movies are a bit better. The Men is best known for being Brando's film debut. He is good as a paraplegic solider who does not adapt to the situation with the good grace one might expect of our Hollywood military men. Although the movie does have the touches from Stanley Kramer the producer that would make the future Stanley Kramer the director so deadly, Everett Sloane is allowed to both provide useful advice as the key doctor in Brando's hospital, and show some rudeness at his patients. A Haunting in Venice is better than Branagh's two previous Agatha Christie movies which were distinctly worse than the seventies version. Now Poirot is in Venice, unlike Christie's character, and Branagh does have some fun with misc-en-scene. The movie also has the advantage of using a lesser known Christie novel (Hallowe'en Party) and revising it from what appears from the Wikipedia summary to be one of Christie's lesser plots. The disadvantage is that the solution is still not among Christie's best, so we don't really get the pleasure of Poirot showing his genius. Trying to get all-star casts for Branagh's previous two movies was another irritating problem with those movies, so here the recognizable stars are limited to an occasionally amusing Tina Fey ("That's not an expression in any language") and Michelle Yeoh as an over-confident medium.